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Hockeytown no more
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Montreal should be an urban ice paradise, but new budget schemes may motivate neighbourhoods to further cut outdoor rinks
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
Once hockey players drop the puck for pickup games on the city's outdoor rinks, none of them throw checks, blast terrifying shots or even keep track of the score. But to those keeping count, players of outdoor hockey might have to do some nifty political stickhandling to get around forthcoming budgetary policy that will reward neighbourhoods for spending less on rinks.
In the new megacity, neighbourhood groups will be invited to manipulate their local leisure budgets by cutting some services to save others, an arrangement that could also threaten the non-hockey playing public, who simply enjoy skating outdoors between December 20 and March 1.
Ideally, Montreal should be an urban ice paradise, and there are indeed some excellent places to cut ice, including picturesque spots like Lafontaine Park, Fletcher's Field, the rink beneath the belvedere at Murray Park and near the woods at Beaver Lake and Angrignon Park.
But in recent years, outdoor skating surfaces have been disappearing fast. There are currently over one-third fewer ice surfaces than there were at the end of the '70s; those quietly sacrificed include the once-glorious skating sites at St-Louis Square and St-Henri Square.
In the mid-'50s, the city of Montreal offered ice at 177 outdoor rinks and skating surfaces, a total that included five artificial rinks, with refrigerated surfaces allowing for unlimited shinny from fall to spring. Although Toronto still maintains several artificial ice outdoor rinks, Montreal can only boast one, a skating-only surface at the Old Port. And don't expect new outdoor artificial-ice anytime soon: at half-a-million smackers each to install, municipal authorities won't even entertain the suggestion.
Ice age meltdown
By 1964 Montreal had 237 rinks, a total that rose to 274 in 1974. But Montreal's great ice age started to melt in 1980, when Drapeau ordered 91 of the rinks closed, leading outdoor hockey aficionados to beg the city fathers to keep them open. The city agreed under the condition that volunteers maintain the ice and ever since, the city has repeated the same pattern: maintain your own ice or lose it.
As a result, 20 of Montreal's 168 outdoor hockey and skating rinks, including those in Oxford and McDonald parks, receive only basic maintenance from the city. Public works employees put up the boards, flood the rink once in December, supply shovels, lights and keys to the shack to park associations and then leave. They only return to clear snow at snowfalls of 15 cm.
Among the proponents of this low-budget maintenance scheme is Michael Applebaum, who was inspired to enter city politics after serving as an icekeeping volunteer for the McDonald Park Association. Applebaum, now an NDG city councillor, believes that citizens can do a good job taking care of the rinks. "Watering the rink isn't hard--it's a pleasure," he says. "What's tedious is the scraping of the rink. Still, I don't see the service as essential."
Applebaum notes that it currently costs the city $16,000 a year to maintain an outdoor rink, whereas one run by community volunteers costs only $5,000. He says that in the future citizens will be asked to choose if they want to spend the extra $11,000 on fully maintained outdoor ice surfaces or spend it other leisure-related expenses. "It's a question of the citizens deciding how they want to spend their money," he says. "If they want to spend it maintaining the outdoor rinks, it means that they'll have to be cuts in service elsewhere."
Although nobody is keeping a formal count, the number of skaters using the rinks appears to be dropping steadily, perhaps because much of today's youth view hockey as an indoor sport and hit the ice exclusively in supervised indoor arenas with full equipment and rules. Others, meanwhile, stick to the couch and enjoy the video game variety of the sport.
Zambonis to the rescue?
As the outdoor rinks empty, the temptation to save money might be overwhelming for citizens' groups. Applebaum says that simply closing more rinks is not currently an option. The catch, though, is that once the rinks fall into the category of the lesser-maintained variety, the city is free to close them down if volunteers stop maintaining them.
Yet the NDG councillor remains optimistic that technology will make for cheaper, better maintenance, and that roving zambonis could help maintain ice surfaces throughout the mega-city. "In the past, eight guys would jump out of a public works truck and it'd take them 90 minutes to do the ice. It was long and tedious. But now we have these zambonis, which take only 15 minutes, so we're going to try to use them in our boroughs."
Outdoor ice surfaces are already vulnerable to unpredictable weather and have--in recent years--been open as few as 28 days per winter, according to outgoing St-Henri councillor Germain Prégent. The ice surfaces maintained by the part-time volunteer force offers even fewer days, he says.
Even paying citizens to maintain rinks can be a crapshoot, if one can judge by a project tried in Côte St-Luc that paid locals $2,000 per rink they agreed to maintain. "I'd love to tell you that it worked great. But on some occasions the guys we hired, well, we'd have trouble getting them to come," says Harold Cammy of the CSL Recreation Department. "So to be honest, the system depended on how frequently they showed up. In some cases we were unhappy, in other cases we weren't."
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